Some of my thoughts when I created this piece were sort of jumbled around the notion of a past event that a few members in my family encountered all at the same time (a death in the family). It all affected us in different ways, yet most of us have different recollections of the event. Thinking that maybe something had slipped by me- I took a closer look, and came up with something interesting. While studying the past and the event I began playing with magnification. Pouring over old grainy fading pictures and trying to make out what I was looking at with a small loupe; scanning pictures into my computer, etc. I noticed that the magnifier distorts. Obviously it distorts, but keeps everything true within it's field of focus. But slightly tilted it starts to distort. At the edges of crisp clean perception there starts the questionable line/void of distorted uncertainess. It is sort of a bubble that draws your imagination in. Suddenly, I was spending more time looking at the odd distortions cast by the magnifier then what i was spending actually studying what I was trying to see. Memory is an odd device, and often it tricks us. We don't necessarily remember things the way they actually happened, but instead we remember events how we would have liked them to have turned out. We remember what we want to remember. Imagination filled the void just out of reach of clear perception, and in the same way imagination filled the void within my own past memories.
My pine cone/ pill bug represented this need to search. I felt that I was out in the woods looking under stones and all I could find was pine cones and pill bugs. My imagination started to act, and suddenly it took over. The pine cone and pill bug morphed together and the magnifiers spread out to keep on searching and distorting... and casting distorted views of imagination.
Chrysalis by David Barnhill 2007chrysalis by David Barnhill 2007Chrysalis by David Barnhill 2007: Here is one of my boxes. My work at this time is dealing with searching and often finding distortions of what we are actually looking for. Imagination often fills in the gaps instead of fact.chrysalischrysalis